Lillene

Enjoy!

Eternus watched as the thread he’d counted on to pull the future together wavered, then snapped. It had always been a weak thread, but it was one of the few threads that pulled things towards the future he’d seen before the moment when a knife ripped through the fabric of the future and changed everything.

He still didn’t know what the knife was; all he knew was that areas he hadn’t needed to pay any attention to suddenly unraveled and took everything else with them. He could barely see what the changes were; they were tiny. A handful of people lived instead of died, a few others died that would have lived … they were mostly so low of a Tier that their impact should be nothing on the scale he worked on. So why did they matter?

Even an entire planet of weak people was inconsequential. Except that this time it wasn’t.

Clearly, another Seer was working against him. He didn’t know what her goal was, but part of it was obvious: she was one of the people who should have died. That was a mistake that was easy enough to fix; it was what Valkyries were designed for. It was simple enough to talk the Memory of Light into sending someone after her.

Eternus supposed he shouldn’t have expected it to work. She had somehow - as a Tier Zero! - completely derailed his future at one of the points he shouldn’t even have needed to intervene. She was definitely a worthy opponent. 

Eternus hadn’t even known about the second attempt until the Memory of Light told him it failed. He’d have told her not to bother; anyone who could stop an assault in the Timestream itself could arrange matters to avert a physical assault that didn’t have a true Seer at its head. The fact that the lead Valkyrie never even saw the target only proved the point.

This piece of broken knotwork in front of him was supposed to be the patch. He couldn’t restore things to where they were supposed to be, but he could reinforce the destruction of a planet that was supposed to die. That wouldn’t remove his enemy if she was even remotely paying attention, but it would remove most of the other changes she’d made and limit the problem. He could work with things from there.

Now he couldn’t. 

Oh, there was a small thread of a chance that the team he’d ordered assembled might manage to catch up to them on Berinath, but that would only happen if the White Tiger managed to kill the Imperial. Eternus would do what he could to enhance that chance, but he needed to direct the team on a route that led towards both the correct dome for Berinath and the Empire’s capital. It wasn’t going to be easy to find.

If he could, he’d choose a route that also intersected with the homeworld of the other moderate-Tier member of their group; there was a fairly strong chance they’d stop by there on the way to Imperius. What was the name of that world again?

Eternus dug through his notes to find the name Suratiz, then shivered as a vision passed over him. It was only a flash, but it was still disconcerting when a vision was close enough to reach him when he wasn’t reaching out. He’d like to look into it later, but if he didn’t manage to, that was fine. 

It was unlikely that a mass celebration where a large minority of the participants wore brightly colored costumes with feathered wings was something he needed to worry about right now. He wasn’t even certain where to start looking. He’d just wait for the next vision; it would probably have a starting point. Many visions weren’t important.

A knock on the door to his study pulled Eternus’s attention fully away from the broken tapestry of time that he needed to reweave and into the present. “Come in!”

The door opened to reveal the Mistress of Novices. “Sir? You asked to know if any of the Vala candidates had a verifiable moment of prophecy without being in meditation.”

Eternus stood immediately. That was not something that happened very often; if he saw three in a decade, it was a good decade. “Excellent! Have you separated her from the other novices and given the other novices their reward?”

It was amazing how hard the novices would work towards a reward that couldn’t be earned through hard work as long as those in charge made it seem like the elevation in status was a result of the lucky girl honing her Talent instead of simply having a better Talent.

The mistress shook her head. “It was one of the guard trainees instead of one of the novices, and he had the bad taste to spout the prophecy in front of the entire contingent of novices at the evening meal. I had him pulled aside for an evaluation by the Healers. We’re lucky it was one of the trainees instead of one of the novices; the prophecy is not one we want spread, so the usual procedure worked in our favor. The Memory of Sky did verify that a foretelling happened.”

Eternus groaned. It was always annoying when one of the guards manifested foresight. A trainee wasn’t as bad, but it still had to be dealt with. In all but a few cases, they were sectioned off to become breeding stock for the more Talented of the pure-sighted Vala. That was a process that was simple and deeply frustrating to Eternus; it meant that he’d have more novices in the future, but there would be years where it seemed like all of the better Seers and most of the other Memories would be distracted, trying to get the attention of the male.

There was rarely more than one, after all. The Talent was extremely uncommon in males and he’d lose some of it with each Talented girl he fathered. The enchantments on the breeding quarters would also drain his life energy to make it more likely the child would be Talented and healthy. He’d likely never know what was happening until very close to the end, and by that point he’d be so weak the women would pull out some of the enchanted assistance.

Eternus was just such a trainee once, but he had very little sympathy for any man who allowed the pleasures of the body to distract him from reality. He’d figured out what would happen very early on and avoided it; they also had the gift of prophecy. If they couldn’t figure it out and find a way around it, their Talents were best served in creating a new generation for Eternus’s use.

“That’s not the worst of it,” the Mistress of Novices continued. “The real problem is what the prophecy said.”

Eternus raised an eyebrow at her. He didn’t expect a significant prophecy to come from a trainee, so he wondered what worried her enough that she was avoiding saying the prophecy. “Well?”

The Mistress of Novices shivered. “Freya’s arms open wide for the children of Mimir, for their parents have chosen the path of war, which has but one destination.”

Eternus frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. There is more than one outcome to war. In any case, we are not at war. That does not sound like a dark prophecy, it sounds like a mysterious one.”

The Mistress of Novices shook her head slightly, as if she couldn’t control her reaction, then bowed slightly. “As you say, Memory of Blood.”

Eternus’s eyes lightened. “Yes, that might be it. Memory! We have embarked on a long endeavor that will live in memory forever. Freya was a seer; that could easily be it.”

The Mistress of Novices brightened a little. “Is that what it means? I thought it was worse than that.” 

Eternus nodded. He didn’t believe it for a moment, but it was important that the Mistress of Novices believe it. She’d suppress the story differently if she believed it was a positive prophecy instead of a negative one and people would take that confidence from her. “It has to be. Why else would a goddess of prophecy welcome the children of Memory?”

The Mistress of Novices nodded, her earlier poorly-hidden frown replaced with a calm confidence. She wasn’t actually happy but she was at least no longer obviously worried. That was acceptable.

“Go and take care of things,” Eternus told her. “You know what to do.”

“Yes, Lord Memory.” The Mistress of Novices bobbed her head in a shallow bow and headed out.

Once she was gone, Eternus leaned back on his throne. He did not actually believe a word he’d said. Not when the prophecy called out Freya. “Still a thorn in my side. Couldn’t you just stay dead?”

Eternus was fairly certain that she was, in fact, dead. The problem was that she had been a seer, a good one. She’d foreseen her death and she was vindictive enough that she had no problem leaving all sorts of little traps for the man who trapped her. He couldn’t yet see how this trap worked, but it might explain why a nothing from a Tier Zero world was outplaying him: she wasn’t. Freya was.

“If I were Freya, what would I … oh, of course. There will be a key on Berinath. Or, no. A key on … what’s that world. Eitchen? Yes, there. Just how far ahead of me has she planned? Is that why the thread snapped?” Eternus dove for his notes. There would be clues in them, clues he’d overlooked. He needed to figure out what Fraya set up before he killed her. What could she possibly have done centuries ago that would ruin his plans now, ruin them badly enough to drive him to war?

The point of planning was to make other people fight without ever knowing they fought for him. Eternus was good at that. 

Eternus made his way down to Freya’s old vault where he’d trapped what little was left of her Memory. There was a reason he was the Memory of Blood, after all; anything that once had blood was a Memory he could call.

When he walked into her cell, a specter in the shape of a woman made of blood floated in front of him. In truth, it was little more than a single drop of blood, all he’d been able to save from the fire she turned on herself when it was clear she wouldn’t survive. That didn’t matter to Memory, and for the Memory of Blood, all blood held Memory.

Eternus didn’t bother with pleasantries. The Memory didn’t need them; it was fully under his control. “Freya. What safeguards did you put into place on Eitchen?” 

“None,” the specter answered. “I do not remember Eitchen.”

“Very well. Tell me what you know about the World Eaters or White Tigers.” He hated to ask a question that broad, but he wasn’t certain where to start.

Freya’s bloody Memory answered emotionlessly. “World Eaters are merely a name for what happens when someone on a world discovers that the World Core is useful for enchanting; if they damage the world enough, people believe it is being eaten. White Tigers are an ancient myth of the most destructive force possible. Whatever they were, they are long gone. They never impacted me.”

Eternus stared at the hated ghost in front of himself. Was this truly not a trap of hers? “What do you know of a World named Earth?”

The specter rocked as if it had been stabbed. Eternus had seen that reaction in a Memory only once before; that time, it was due to overloading the Memory with the bloody power of his Throne. He didn’t understand why Freya’s ghost would react that way to the name of a World.

“Tranquility is a myth, and one that it is better not to probe. I did, once, to my eternal regret.” 

Lillene

At least the capital of the Empire isn’t Empire City! Given the fact that it was established with the specific goal of being the capital, that wouldn’t have been that far out of line.